Can we talk about colourblind casting...

[CurlewKate]

...without the thread descending into a woke/anti-woke stramash?

Obviously it's a great advance that black actors now have access to many more parts than they did- and obviously in most cases it makes absolutely no difference to the play, show, whatever. But I was watching Shardlake,and it struck me that it was impossible that the Abbot of a 16th century monastery in rural England would be black. And that casting black actors in positions of power and influence might well give viewers a completely unrealistic idea of the status of black people in British history, and actually gloss over their struggles. So stylised historical figures, as in Shakespeare where we all know there's an element of fantasy (I recently saw a colourblind Coriolanus that was brilliant),no issue at all, of course. But historical dramas that are trying to represent life in the past roughly as it was-maybe actually unhelpful?

Incidentally, I know that one of the main characters in the Shardlake books is black. But he has a detailed backstory, and the discrimination he faced is part of his life.

Just watched Aida (again) with a very white Ethiopian Aida, as well as the rest of the characters.

Someone would have to be very dim for it to cause confusion, just as you would have to be dim to think non-white people all have to be downtrodden and only exist in ‘lower’ society for a country to have systemic racism.

Surely we shouldn’t aim to focus entertainment around stupid people?

Credit where it's due though because at the very least people are having these discussions in good faith. It must be absolutely harrowing, utterly devastating to go to a play, show or whatever and have absolutely zero idea what's going on because an errant Black person on stage appears to have thrown the whole thing off.
Cast off your shadow and just say what you want to say. Whoever wrote earlier about the inaccuracies vis a vis the power, positions and struggles of Black people has thus far come the closest. Just another step and it'll be fully off your chest.

But that's surely overthinking it?

He was an actor playing a fictional part on stage.

I saw Kathryn Hunter play King Lear. She was fabulous. I hadn’t seen or read King Lear and I had no cognitive dissonance at all: what I saw was King Lear. BUT I knew beforehand what the story was and I knew that I was watching a woman playing the part of a man.

I live in Edinburgh, a diverse city of half a million residents. I can go for weeks travelling on the buses daily without meeting a black bus driver. Perhaps there are black bus drivers with English accents working on rural routes in Scotland but I really, really doubt it.

Edinburgh is not diverse! It is 90% white. 2% black.

There may or may not be black drivers with English accents on rural routes, but there could be. Nearly 30% of Tobermory residents aren't Scottish according to the last census.

If you want Balamory to be real, ship out half the Scottish cast and have their houses sitting empty for most of the year. Fill the streets with double parked camper vans, to big to fit on the roads, have a cruise ship moored nearby with hundreds of day trippers, show the local shop being understaffed because of a shortage of worker housing. They'd also have to get rid of Archie and his Castle, given that is 170 miles away on the mainland, in North Berwick.

Them having a black, English bus driver is actually the most "likely to be actually real" thing on the show.

Yes!!!! I always get their names mixed up!!
Damn!!

Most people on this thread seem to be of the opinion that colour-blind casting is by-and-large to be welcomed, but there are a small number of instances where it's not clear as to whether the race of the actor, or the character, is intended to be a plot point in the story or not (e.g. parentage, attitudes towards them, privilege afforded to them).

Does this seem about right?

It's also been interesting to read how theatre is seen differently compared to TV wrt supposed 'realism'. You can do far "stretchier" stuff on stage in my experience, particularly when you're often 'playing with' a classic.

Why are all the hermione grainger actors in the cursed child plays black ?

If Hamilton confused any one or people thought Hamilton was actually black sounds like they need to be more educated.

I think, rightly or wrongly, a lot of people do turn to period dramas to learn about the past. You can say they shouldn't, but the fact is they do and my view is that colour-blind casting will inevitably cause some degree of confusion.

I would say that DH who thought that Alexander Hamilton was black is above average in terms of intelligence. He knows, for example, that Alexandre Dumas was black so he wouldn't have found it surprising for Alexander Hamilton as another historical figure who he is not overly familiar with to have been black. Neither of us have seen the musical Hamilton and maybe he would have questioned things if he had seen that so many other characters are black too.

I'm still not against colour-blind casting but I think it's silly not to admit that it will cause some confusion. It's easy to just say that people should be more educated but we have to be realistic about that. We are not suddenly going to see the whole population of the U.K. reading books on the founding fathers and serious documentaries. Many will turn to fiction to get the gist.

There is no argument that Britain has a racist history or that it still is a racist society.

If it were the case that simply recasting black actors in roles could erase that history then GB news would advocate for it, rather than have palpitations every time somebody non-white gets cast in a role, even if it's just for a TV advert.

This whole debate reminds me of the flack Impressionists got for not painting in the right colours and not looking natural.

People learnt the new language in painting and eventually they'll learn to read blind casting as it is intended.

I disagree edited to add with the op! in times gone by if everything was about the white man, then it means we’ll continue to only ever see white men everywhere . It’s the same as when we get to see female Sherlock Holmes’s etc and people get up in arms about it or black Disney princesses. We need variety that reflects the population!

Stage will always have to be more flexible with regards to race as, unless stage productions are going to be cast as entirely single race, then the understudy may not match the race of the actor they are stepping in for. I’m not aware of any productions that can afford to an understudy per named character, it’s just not realistic.

OK apologies - I'm not sure how else I would interpret "My only problem with the kind of historical realism you [as in OP talking about historically real stories] seem to be advocating is that black actors then end up only portraying characters who struggle as a result of their race. That would be so dull (for them and us) and unfair."

I think it's a useful thing to think about anyway!

Exactly. I think people would rather black actors stick to roles involving slavery.

Happy to discuss. It is possible an abbot in sixteenth century England could be black - though I don't think there was one but there is at least one black monk mentioned in the fifteenth century. In the Shardlake novels the black character was the Infirmarian of an abbey Shardlake goes to shut down. He later becomes an important character but he is not the abbot, who is a from a local merchant family.
Colour blind casting of Shakespeare is problematic when he is writing about real historical people. Richard III was not black. Corialanus was a Roman citizen under the Republic, so unlikely he was black, but Aufidius, his opponent, could well be. If I remember correctly - read Coriolanus years ago - Aufidius is from North Africa, like Othello. Aufidius and Othello could both be black, equally they could look like Arabs.
Historical accuracy needs to be maintained. It's misleading to suggest that powerful people in Europe were black when they were not. The other thing we need to maintain is the suspension of belief in the viewer. Thus, a set of blood-related characters in a play/TV series/film should all be the same ethnicity, it doesn't matter what ethnicity, however.

Do you think that a film about Rosa Parks would still work if it were played by a white woman?

Probably not. The story was about a woman who was arrested for civil disobedience because of her skin colour. The skin colour is integral to the story, in many ways, it is the character. It was the story of a black woman who happened to be called Rosa Parks, it was not the story of Rosa Parks who happened to be black.

The only way you could do it would be to have her as a white woman, and all her protagonists and the rest of the bus passengers being black. That would make an interesting re-make.

Colourblind casting is largely done with historical or fictional characters. Have any been made about people who are still alive today?

And I lose count of the number of silly online threads I've seen from people who genuinely believe, since that TV adaptation, that Anne Boleyn was black.

Doesn't that say more about the woefully inadequate teaching of history in our schools?

All ethnicities have been enslaved, so that's nonsense. I don't see why MLK cannot be played by a white person if you are going to say Hamilton (who was white) can be played by a black person. Historical people should be the ethnicity they were. There are lots of films and plays to write, make, perform about important and interesting people from around the world - let's do that rather than pretend Richard III could have been black.

That is what I've also taken from the thread. It's been an interesting discussion mostly conducted in good faith.

I think that Shakespeare is an interesting case, given that his own troupe of players wasn't diverse at all and included men-playing-women. I don't think that there was any expectation from the audience that the history plays were particularly accurate. Just as, in earlier times, everyone knew that Thucydides or Tacitus simply made up impressive speeches for their characters. Accuracy in historical fiction is a strangely modern thing.

By that same logic, you do know that women were also back of the line in many societies. Let's just have heavy, white male casting and do away with female and poc altogether. Also kids having their say; that was a no no - let's cut them out too.

But it isn't about "the best actor being cast for the role". It's about positive discrimination for commercial £££ reasons.

Any drama school in the UK now selects more Black students than white from applicants who are composed massively more of white applicants. So let's say that 100 white and 50 black people apply, 20 black and 10 white are taken.

Why? because drama schools know

a) this is needed, to counter the history of rich white people being actors, but more realistically because

b) agents want black actors on their books because casting directors want black actors for roles because society atm wants to see black actors.

The solution is to tell more minority stories, not shoe-horn minorities into other stories.

How do you know those actors aren’t the best?

I’ve never seen white actors accused of getting the role just because they were white.